Microsoft Now Internally Using Windows Azure To Run Skype, SkyDrive And More

Microsoft’s Cloud platform Windows Azure is evolving at the rate in which even industry leaders like Amazon are now within the reach in terms of feature parity. Speaking to The Channel, Microsoft’s Windows Azure president Scott Guthrie revealed some interesting information about Azure, how it is evolving, how it compares to Amazon, etc,. He also said that Skype now runs on Windows Azure, all new storage of SkyDrive goes to Azure, part of Xbox Live is now powered by Azure and Office 365 used Azure’s identity management for authentication.

Some excerpts from the interview,

“We have more regions than Amazon, we have coverage in places like China that they’re not in,”.

“If you want to reach the globe the most, we’re the cloud vendor to do it.”

“Every Office 365 customer has a Windows Azure Active Directory login,” he said. “All authentication, all security, all access control for Office 365 goes through Windows Azure. Xbox Live and Xbox One heavily use Windows Azure on the back end. Skype, a lot of which is built here in our London developer centre, is also now running on Azure. SkyDrive, they are in the process of decommissioning their old servers and moving everything onto Azure. All new storage on SkyDrive now goes to Azure.”

“When you start adding in things like Visual Studio online, continuous delivery, source control hosting, remote debugging, diagnostics features, it starts to become differentiated. Azure Active Directory, the ability to synch on-premise directories to the cloud and then build apps that do single sign-on. Trying to do that on any other cloud platform is really hard. If you want to do MapReduce jobs, and integrate analytics into your system, our HDInsight service makes it easy.”

When Microsoft first released the HTML5 portal for Windows Azure, it had “four or five icons. It had VMs, web sites, storage, networking and cloud services. Now we’re up to 26. Each one of the portal extensions now is also 10 times richer than it was in June 2012,” says Guthrie.